Too Many Messages

Too many messagesThey say the first step towards solving a problem is admitting you have it. So I'll admit it: my name is Michael Miller and I have an e-mail addiction. Between multiple notebooks with Outlook, a couple of office...

Too many messagesThey say the first step towards solving a problem is admitting you have it. So I'll admit it: my name is Michael Miller and I have an e-mail addiction. Between multiple notebooks with Outlook, a couple of office desktops, web mail access and an ever-present Treo running the Goodlink mail client, I'm almost never without my mail, and I find myself checking it ridiculously often.

But I on vacation last week and thus offline almost the whole time. I didn't have a phone with me, although I did bring a laptop. Still, I only checked my mail a couple of times (just checking on family and some columns that went to press last week), each for less than 15 minutes. And you know what? Life went on. We actually had a great time, saw many fascinating places; and I got to spend some more time with my wife and kids.

Of course, everything has its price, and here it is Monday morning and I have just under 1000 unread messages. Surprisingly, very little of that appears to be spam -- my guess is it will turn out to be about 10 to 15 messages. I attribute that to good server-side filters, supplemented by a couple of different client-side filters.

So what's in the rest of the mail? Another 20 or 25 percent are e-mail newsletters I've subscribed to - a lot of these are news recaps and similar things, which are fairly useless after a few days,; a few are from companies whose products I have bought and registered. But I can't call them spam, because I did ask for them. It looks like about half are press releases and unsoliticited pitches from PR people. It's their job to ask, and part of mine to see if there's anything interesting. But it isn't top priority.All of these will get pushed to a "later" folder, while I spend the day trying to go through the 250 or so "real messages". I also have a couple of speeches to work on this week. Oh, yes, and maybe I'll write something as well.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality, and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions...
More »